It can be a really effective premise to confine your
characters to a single location fort eh duration of the drama. The ancient
Greeks were certainly aware of this as a narrative device. It can work best in
a thriller and there are many that throw a bunch of people together for a
single night and then dispatch them one by one.
James Mangold’s Identity
starts eerily and mysteriously with newspaper clippings of a motel murder and
voiceover recordings of a psychiatrist (Alfred Molina) talking to the alleged
perpetrator. Then suddenly we’re thrust into a motel office as a man bursts in
holding his bleeding wife shouting at the clerk to call an ambulance. Then in
overlapping flashbacks we see the sequence of events, involving a young call
girl, a limousine driver and an aging movie star, and a young boy who never
speaks, that led to the accident. Because of a terrible rain storm that has washed
out the road in both directions, all these characters and more wind up at the
motel together.
